Black white and the grays in between- Book Review

Gosh! it is tough to review a book written by a friend. There are two reasons why it’s tougher for me: The author Abhishek Hemrajaniis not only my friend from ISB(batchmate) but was also my colleague in Microsoft. I consider him an extremely smart dude, so the moment I knew he published a book, I knew I was picking it up.

The issue with reviewing a book written by someone you know is ,that it is hard to be completely unbiased. You either are too forgiving or too merciless because you go overboard with trying to be “unbiased”. It is like being a teacher’s Son…Teachers are either too caring or too strict so that other kids do not feel a bias .
I will try my best to not fall for both the pitfalls.

PS: Review coming from someone who is not a fan of this genre of books

Longer version :

Overall I really liked the book. The plot is pacy and there were not many instances where there were unnecessary explanations or forced words

The story line is tight with no loose ends or over the top melodrama. Many sensitive situations have been handled beautifully . I wanted to talk about some of the situations but it may give away the plot :). What I liked most about the characters was that they were very relatable, they were just like you and me.They mostly behaved the way they were expected to behave. You could see why they made the choices they made.

I was able to imagine every character and every scene vividly in my head and can happily say that the author did a great job here .

Another thing that struck me was the amount of research the author seemed to have done about the doctor’s profession . Dude, you know a lot 🙂

What I would have loved to see though is more stuff about Kanak’s father Keshav. I felt that his character needed to be developed further , I just expected a bit more . Same is the case with Ashar .Would have to loved to read a bit more about his and Rukhsar’s story .

Another interesting part of the book were couplets at a couple of places. It is fairly tough to pull this off . Couplets are very difficult beasts to tame and can break the flow of the story or just add another beautiful dimension altogether . The author chose to use them very judiciously :+1 to that.

Overall it is a very well balanced book. Considering that it is Abhishek’s first book only , I can only imagine what the expectations from his next books would be. He has set high benchmarks for himself :).